The door was at her back. Xantcha ducked and ran out, leaving it open behind her, listening for the sounds that never came. She settled in the darkness, wrestling with her conscience, until the lamps in her shared room had flickered and died. Approaching the door through starlight, she saw a dark silhouette at the table, where Ratepe had fallen asleep with his head on his arms. She crept past him, as silently as she'd crept toward the Pincar catacomb. Her bed was strung with a creaking rope mattress. Xantcha quietly tucked herself in a corner by her treasure chest.
Ratepe was sprawled on the bed when she awoke. Urza was in the doorway, the golden light of dawn behind him.
"Are you ready to "walk?" he asked.
Urza never came into her side of the cottage. Perhaps he thought she'd been sleeping in the corner since Ratepe arrived. They weren't ready to 'walk anyway; Ratepe wasn't ready to wake up. He was cross-grained from the moment his eyes opened. Xantcha expected him to start something they'd all regret, but instead he just said, "You decide," as he slipped past Urza on his way to the well.
"We don't need you to 'walk us anywhere," Xantcha said to Urza as she stretched the kinks out of her legs. Her foot felt as if her boot was lined with hot, sharp needles.
"I don't want you near here while I work."
"We won't be."
"Don't dawdle, then. I want to get started!"
Ratepe stayed away while Xantcha rearranged her traveling gear. She packed a good deal of gold and silver, which could be traded wherever they went, but included copper, too, in case they got no farther than their closest neighbors along the frontier between the ridge and the coast. She threw in flour for journey bread, as well, and thought about the hunter's bow suspended from the rafters. Nine days could be an uncomfortably long time to live off journey bread, but a bow could be troublesome in a city. In the end Xantcha put a few more coins in her belt purse, left the bow on its hook, and met a sulking Ratepe beside the well.
Urza either didn't notice or didn't care that Xantcha and Ratepe were scarcely speaking to each other. He'd been away from his workroom for nearly a half-year and didn't wait to see the sphere rise before sealing himself in with his ideas.
The morning sun was framed with fair weather clouds against a rich blue sky. Prairie wildflowers blanketed the land above which the sphere soared. It was difficult, in the face of such natural beauty, to remain sullen and sour, but Xantcha and Ratepe both rose to the challenge. A northwest wind stream caught the sphere and carried it toward Kovria, southeast of the ridge. There was nothing in the Kovrian barrens to hold Xantcha's attention, no destinations worth mentioning, but changing their course
meant choosing their course, so they drifted into Kovria.
By mid-afternoon, the tall-grass prairies of the ridge had given way to badlands.
"Where are we going?" Ratepe asked, virtually the first full sentence he'd uttered since the sphere rose.
"Where does it look like we're going?"
"Nowhere."
"Then nowhere, it is. Nowhere's good enough for me."
"Put us down. You're crazed, Xantcha. Something happened in Efuan Pincar, and it's left you crazed. I don't want to be up here with you."
Xantcha brought them down on a plain of baked dirt and weedy scrub. They were both silent while the sphere collapsed and powdered.
"What went wrong?" Ratepe asked as he brushed the last of the white stuff from his face. "It's not just sleepers. Sleepers wouldn't frighten you, and you're afraid. I didn't think there was anything that could do that."
"Lots of things frighten me. Urza frightens me, sometimes. You frighten me. The between-worlds frightens me. Demons frighten me." Xantcha tore a handful of leaves off the nearest bush and began shredding them. Let Ratepe guess; let him choose, if he could.
"There was a demon in Avohir's temple? In the catacombs with the dead Shratta? A Phyrexian demon?"
Ratepe was uncommonly good at guessing and choosing. "I don't know any other kind."
"Avohir's mercy! You and Urza didn't find demons anywhere else, did you?" "I didn't."
"Why Efuan Pincar? If a Phyrexian demon was going to come to Dominaria, why come to Efuan Pincar. We keep to ourselves. When our ancestors left Argive, they never looked back. They settled on the north shore of Gulmany because it's so far away from everywhere else. We're not rich. We don't bother our neighbors, and they've never bothered us. We don't even have an army-which is probably why we had trouble with the Shratta and the Red-Stripes, but why would that interest Phyrexia? I don't understand. Do you?"
"I told you, demons frighten me. I didn't ask questions, just... just got away." She stripped another handful of leaves. Xantcha wanted to tell Ratepe everything, but the words to get her started weren't in her mind.
"The day you bought me, I told you that you were a lousy liar. You may be three thousand years old, Xantcha, but my eight-year-old brother could fib better than you. When he got into trouble, though, I could guess what he was hiding, 'cause I'd hidden it myself. I can't guess about demons."
Xantcha scattered the leafy bits and faced Ratepe. "It was Gix. I smelled sleepers in the sanctuary, I followed the smell, planting spiders as I went, yours and Urza's both. I wound up way underground, in the dark. There was a passageway, one of the big, old, upright ones, and there was Gix."
"You said Gix had been killed in the Sixth Sphere." "The Seventh. He was excoriated, consigned to endless torment. We were taught that nothing escapes the Seventh Sphere." "Another Phyrexian lie? You're sure it was Gix,
not some other demon?"
"Yes." One answer for both questions. "Did he hurt you?"
Ratepe never failed to ask the question Xantcha wasn't expecting. "I'm here, aren't I?"
"Then, what's got you so riled? Why were we headed 'nowhere'? Unless ... wait, I get it now. Urza's sent you off with the mere mortal. He's not that crazed. He knows what I am, who I'm not. He's going back after Gix, and you're here with me instead of-"
"I didn't tell Urza." The words belched out of her.
"You found a Phyrexian demon under Avohir's temple and you didn't tell Urza?"
She turned away in shame.
"Of course," Ratepe sighed. "He'd yell at you and blame you, just as I've yelled at you and blamed you. And you are a lot like my little brother when you get accused of something that's not your fault. And Gix. Gix was the one who got Mishra. Mishra didn't know-not until it was too late. Strange thing. They fought over those two stones that are Urza's eyes now, but I don't think either brother could hear the stones sing."
Xantcha took a deep breath. "Do you wonder why you can hear them."
"I can't hear them. I only hear Mishra's stone. I don't know for sure that the Mightstone sings, but-yes, I do wonder. I think about it a lot, more than I want to. Why? Did Gix say something about the stones?"
"Yes. He said he made them, and then he said something about you." And Urza, Xantcha's mind added, but not her tongue.
Ratepe was pale and speechless.
"He could have gotten your name out of my mind. I was careful what I gave him, enough to keep him from digging too deep. But I got in trouble. Serious trouble." Xantcha's hands were shaking. She clasped them together behind her back. "He had me, Rat. I was walking toward the passageway. I would've gone into Phyrexia, and that would've been the end of me, I'm sure. Then, suddenly, all I could think of was you."
"Me?"
"You're the first 'mere mortal' I've gotten to know. You've..." Blood rushed to Xantcha's face. She was hot, embarrassed, but she stumbled on. "Thinking about you pulled me back. But Gix was in my mind when I did, so he could have taken your name and made a lie around it. Everything he said could've been lies ... probably was lies." And why share Gix's lies with anyone? "He didn't tell me anything I didn't know, except, maybe, about the Thran. And, well, Mishra knew some things about the Thran."